Article Archives

Menachem Begin: A New Life

Ensuring that another Holocaust would never take place was Menachem Begin's paramount concern, even when he was Prime Minister of Israel, pursuing Yasir Arafat in his Beirut bunker.

“They All Could Have Been Saved”

Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus personally rescued 50 Jewish children from Nazi-era Vienna and brought them home to Philadelphia.  A new documentary tells their story—and contrasts it with the apathy shown by their community.

The Last Books

The invisible structures created by the Jewish people of Eastern Europe over a thousand years were given shape and transmitted through the books and the documents collected by YIVO.  These structures still move us.  If we do not know what they are, we do not know ourselves.

The Decline of the Rabbi-Intellectual

The congregation-based scholars of yesteryear labored to make Judaism intellectually stimulating as well as emotionally stirring and politically applicable.  

The Politics of Yiddish

Jews who hold on to, or reach back for, the Yiddishkeyt of Yiddish yearn not merely for a declining language but for the social and political ideal that seems embedded in it.  

Simply the Besht

Earlier biographers of the Ba'al Shem Tov had left him shrouded in the mists of legend.  But Moshe Rosman insisted that "only by bringing the Besht down to earth will it be possible to evaluate his way in the service of heaven."

Not-So-Young Adult

With remarkable sensitivity and clarity, Israeli novelist Nava Semel portrays children in Mandate Palestine working as hard as they can to make sense of a post-Holocaust, pre-state limbo.

Orthodox Schooling: What Do We Know?

80 percent of American Jewish day school students are Orthodox, but there is little research on the state of Orthodox education—because the Orthodox community has never funded it.

The Bible: From One-Reeler to Docu-drama

The History Channel's The Bible is a small epic, with editorial choices that produce predictable results.  But some of this smallness yields unexpected insights.

Zionism Before Herzl

In 1876, 21 years before Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress, a non-Jewish woman, writing for an English audience, published a novel with a powerful Zionist message.  She went by the name of George Eliot.